The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development

  • Citation: Vitalis, Robert. “The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 4 (2010): 909–38.
    • Topics:
    • Human Rights
    • Keywords:
    • supremacy
    • dependency
    • politics

Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863). His best-known work is An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.” Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

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